Michael Innes (TTMA05)
Michael Innes, an academic (English Professor) whose "real" name was J.I.M. Stewart, died in 1994; as I write this, he's one of only two authors on my TTMA05 list not still living and producing. He's also the author on this list I'm least likely to recommend without reservation, because I can't bring myself to say that his mystery novels are the pinnacle of the genre, although I find them vastly entertaining and very much to my taste and sense of humor. Sense of humor, however, is far from universal.
The first book of his that I read, probably twenty years ago, was From London Far (published in 1946). It chronicles the adventures of an English don, prone to muttering fragments of poetry, who happens to mutter a fragment in a tobacconist's shop that causes him to be mistaken for the leader of an international art-smuggling ring (and that's just the beginning of an entire string of ridiculous improbabilities). Not long thereafter the don finds himself momentarily alone in a secret room beneath the tobacconist's shop, wondering whether he is about to be rubbed out, then stops to ponder at some length whether "to rub out" is still current vernacular. I laughed out loud repeatedly, and I rarely laugh out loud from reading a book.
There are two things about Innes that stand out for me: 1) his series featuring the very sophisticated Inspector John Appleby (later Sir John), perhaps the last in the long line of credible characters descended from Lord Peter Wimsey; and 2) his (non-series) books with the utterly ridiculous plots, like From London Far: arch, ironically erudite, and silly in precisely the form that I prefer my silliness.
[This post is part of my Top Twenty Mystery Authors 2005 series.]